


Exquisite Corpse

by okapi



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Exquisite Corpse, Hand Jobs, Inspired by Poetry, Love at First Sight, M/M, Oral Sex, Smoking, Storytelling, Suspenders of Disbelief Required, reference to attempted suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 03:07:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14227800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi
Summary: A nude body, a dim doctor, and the man who would be Sleuth.Holmes/Watson. Alternate First Meeting.





	Exquisite Corpse

**Author's Note:**

> For National Poetry Month, I assembled--with the brilliant contributions of four kind poets--an [exquisite corpse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse) poem, which can be read at the beginning of the fic. I think it's a splendid bit of verse and the fic flowed from it.

**_Festooned carpet implicates fecund tones_ **

**_Fetid copse gamahuches ruby-red bones_ **

**_Feeble medallion meanders down tart breath_ **

**_Feverish sailcloth consecrates adamantine death_ **

* * *

I didn’t know it then, of course, but pacing like a caged tiger in a hotel corridor holds all the significance of an oscillation upon the pavement.

My heart was vibrating in my throat by the time the courage to knock had been summoned.

If he looked puzzled, if he looked alarmed, if he looked angry, if he asked the most logical of questions, what in heavens was I doing at his door at this hour, hadn’t we agreed to meet tomorrow at noon at Barts, I had legion of equally logical explanations at the ready.

I held my breath. I willed my blood to stop pounding.

All for naught.

He didn’t look puzzled or alarmed or angry. His expression was damnably unreadable. He took a step backwards and motioned for me to enter, then closed the door behind me.

And then.

And then.

And then he slammed me against the wall, my back hitting with a delicious thud, my hands pinned over my head at the wrists.

He was aiming to kiss me, I suppose, or rather, given the force of assault, crush his lips upon mine, but I, struck by dizzying relief, had thrown my head back, looked up at the ceiling and exhaled.

So he bit my chin instead.

He licked and suckled at the bony prominence while I marveled that being understood was so much like being loved that I didn’t care to ever be loved again.

I lowered my head and gave him my mouth for ravishing, and it was my fantasy of the afternoon made flesh in teeth and tongue and lips.

In bite.

He ground his erect, oh, I wasn’t a religious man, but, oh, _God_ , erect prick into my thigh.

He tasted of tobacco and whiskey. I licked at his mouth, wanting more of it, but he looked down, admiring, or so I hoped, the bulge.

He made quick work of the front of my trousers.

He spat.

He spat.

He spat on his palm.

It was going to be a rough frigging, but I didn’t care.

Didn’t care? I welcomed it. I spread my legs a bit and canted my hips like a whore.

The likeness hadn’t escaped him.

He snorted. He licked his lips.

Wicked sod.

For a look like that, he could’ve thrown me over the laboratory bench at Barts and mounted me, with bloody Stanford selling tickets.

His mouth claimed mine, the act too ruthless, too demanding, too merciless to be something the poets often call kissing. His fist worked my prick. His other hand was on my hair, gripping my scalp by the follicles.

He wasn’t the sort to judge a man by his staying power, was he?

I closed my eyes.

That I had read him correctly seemed almost as extraordinary as finding a reagent that was precipitated by haemoglobin and nothing else.

What a day.

He released my mouth and leaned forward, his head brushing mine. I listened to the music of his ragged breath, tattooed its rhythm on my skin.

His eyes were cast downward once more.

Watching his handiwork and my response?

Well, he got his show.

* * *

I wanted him laid bare on that narrow bed so badly that my teeth ached. I wanted the floor beneath our shoes festooned with carelessly strewn raiment. I wanted the ether of this shabby little chamber of despair and idleness filled with the quiet groans of our urgent, industrious coupling.

But I knew.

Too much. Too soon.

Beds were for lovers, and we were not that.

Not yet.

He wobbled, and I remembered his injuries, his illness, his weakness, as confessed to a stranger.

_Another set of vices when I’m well._

God damn, _yes_ , let’s get him well.

I guided him to the only chair in the room, it as spartan as the bed.

He sat. The chair creaked. I fell to my knees.

I had the impression of beefy red and handsome girth and a copse of dark wiry hair. If we made it to bed, I promised myself I’d ogle him to my prick’s content, but we had to make it to the bed and that meant what I wanted had to wait.

I licked up his shaft, then caught his gaze.

Whore.

A bit too much, perhaps.

He hadn’t smiled.

I went to work, suckling his prickhead, then swallowing the whole of him, bit by bit, relaxing my throat, willing myself not to sputter or cough. I breathed in his scent, made fetid and fascinating by his frank arousal. My arms stretched on either side of him, resting lightly upon his thin frame. My limbs were instruments of observation, communication, like my ears, at the business of gauging what pleased, displeased him.

I wanted to please him. So very badly. To get him in that bed. And keep him there. Quite possibly forever.

He put his hands on the back of my head, fingers in my hair once more.

I could not forestall the whimper. Though genuine, I didn’t wish it to be taken for another tart’s trick.

By way of distraction, I bobbed, letting his hands be my guide.

As it turned out, he liked it quick and fast and rough. Easy enough. I made myself machine, toy. For his use. For his pleasure.

A groan. A creak.

He spent.

I swallowed and looked up, as anxious as I had been on the other side of the door.

His unease was transparent.

Quite.

Time to go.

He stopped my rising with a cupped hand to my cheek, and the gesture was so redolent of tenderness that I knew.

I knew.

I knew.

That I was home.

He met my gaze.

“I have scars.”

Oh, what a stupid man. At once, I pledged my troth: to dazzle all the foolish notions out of his cretinous skull. In sickness, health, ‘til deaths do. Amen.

I kissed sweetly along his jaw until I reached his earlobe, then nuzzled at his neck. And if I required further evidence of anything, which I did not, I had it when he responded by petting me like a faithful companion.

We kissed again. This time like lovers.

He pulled away. He glanced towards the bed.

* * *

I hid my ecstasy by getting to my feet and swiftly ridding myself of everything from boots to braces. My eagerness was, perhaps, unexpected for when I looked up, his eyes were lit with mirth, his expression soft.

But still no smile.

He began to fumble with one of his own shirt buttons.

I hadn’t the patience or the tolerance for liquor to be a nurse. Or a nursemaid. Or a maid.

But I was a man who could do two things at once.

I kissed him like I wanted to go on kissing him for eternity while my fingers aided his in the removal of his clothing. Then I led him to the bed.

And had him just as I’d wanted him.

And.

And?

And, as is so often the case.

And nothing.

His prick was soft. Mine, too.

I stood by the bed, studying him, committing his features to memory, the too-thin frame, the skin alternating nut-brown and pale. He was older, naturally, and a bullet wound had mangled his left shoulder—

I realised, much, much too late, that he wasn’t finding the scrutiny, the inventory, flattering. Or arousing.

Quite the contrary.

I murmured an apology and then a second, and then leaned down to kiss his lips. He curled a hand ‘round my neck and, mercifully, kissed me back.

But the silence that had been companionable became, quite suddenly, oppressive. Gripped by paroxysm, I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind.

“Cigarette?”

He chuckled, then nodded.

I fetched my case forthwith from the carpet.

He raised an eyebrow.

I’d only four cigarettes, but they were much nicer than I could afford.

“Won, not stolen.”

That earned me a laugh, and I was instantly drunk on the sound.

I stared at his hands as he took one and fiddled with it, then watched as he rolled to his side and reached down, producing a match from the pile of debris on the floor.

I continued to stare, to watch, just his hands as they went about the common-enough machinations to which every smoker attends, but by the time he took his first draw, I was as stiff as Lucifer himself.

Seduction is ever

ever

ever in the eye of the seduced.

He sat up, propping himself against the wall. With the hand holding the cigarette, he motioned for me to sit opposite him at the foot of the bed.

I obliged, then took the cigarette when he offered it, cursing myself for not thinking to bring, that is, connive to obtain, a flask with a drought or two of choice spirit.

He groaned as he leaned down, but when he righted himself, I observed that one of his palms was coated with slick.

I inched towards him on my knees, hips forward, offering him my needy, reedy, silly little prick just as I’d offered him those Bradley, Oxford Streets earlier.

Whore.

But he didn’t seem to mind now.

We smoked. And he gave me a frigging as raw and as rough and as wonderful as my poor prick had ever known—and, I might add, in much the same manner of a circus performer whose feats are always described using the qualifying phrase ‘with one arm tied behind his back.’  

He cleaned me with a handkerchief, his prick still soft.

“I’ve been ill.”

I didn’t care. He’d be well soon enough. And soon I’d know him well enough to bring him off in a hansom cab while noon-day church bells tolled in the distance.

But now.

Now.

Now.

It was time.

“Would you like to hear a story?”

I wasn’t much of a storyteller, but one look at his face told me that he was.

Storytellers always appreciate a good story.

And this was a good story.

And one that wouldn’t wait any longer to be told.

* * *

_I was where I should not have been in a boat too small for even one young man._ _And, yes, the boat was stolen, or rather borrowed without permission._ _I was far too old to be playing pirate, but…_

_I was rowing upstream with the idea that would exert myself at the commencement of my adventure and rest on the return. It was not as difficult as it might have been, for though the body of water I was travelling was technically a slow river, this stretch where I found myself was usually called ‘The Pond’ by the locals. More than that I didn’t know._

_The weather was bright and clear and clement, but I hadn’t seen a soul since I pushed off. As I turned a bend, making the gentlest of ripples with my oars, I heard a loud snoring and spied a man sleeping under a tree near the bank. His face, save for an enormous grey beard, was covered by a large-brimmed, soft, shapeless brown hat._

_He stirred and then he started violently._

_He started to yell. He removed his hat and began to wave it._

_Was he mad?_

_He stood. I spied a bottle on its side at the base of the tree._

_Not mad, drunk._

_Not wanting any part of him, I quietly eased my tiny craft to the perfect spot for unobserved observation: a patch of low-hanging trees and vegetation shielded me from his view but did not occlude my own line of sight._

_He was bent at the bank’s edge, struggling to heave something cumbersome from the water._

_Not something, someone._

_A body!_

_A naked body in the river!_

_The old man fretted over it. I strained my ears to hear his mutterings. I caught only one intelligible word._

_“Dead, dead, dead, dead…”_

_He paced. He raved. He made a strangle motion with his hand at his own neck. He came suddenly towards me, and I thought I was discovered, but, no, he stopped. Now I could see he was twisting a chain around his neck. He turned back, his hand did not, and there was glint of something cast down upon the ground._

_He didn’t notice the loss, but I did._

_Then he fled._

_I tied the boat to a tree and quietly crawled out of the vessel._

_I approached the body, stopping just where the old man had._

_I could see the figure well enough._

_And he was beautiful, the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. I studied him, or rather I tried to study him, but really, I just, well, drank him in. Muscles and skin and hair and…_

_He looked like a sculpture, but not the kind chiseled from stone, the kind moulded from clay by hands that knew beauty and loved beauty and…_

_He looked like Antinous._

_And I wanted to…_

_I wanted…_

_I feared my own thoughts._

_I looked at him again and tried to see him as a puzzle, not as…anything else. There were no bruises or other signs of violence. No injuries that I could see._

_Had he drowned accidently? On purpose?_

_I looked down. There was the gold chain of the old man and a gold medallion strung along it._

_I heard voices, and fear seized me. I flew back to my boat._

_The old man was running, another man and a woman following closely behind him. The two men reached the body and began to argue, but the woman screeched, grabbed at the second man’s waist, and fell to the ground._

_I couldn’t see her movements, but I knew their effect._

_Coughing, sputtering, retching groans, and the body, of its own volition, turning on its side._

* * *

 “By Jove, Holmes!”

“I must add that the medallion I saw bore the rod of Aesclepius.”

“The old man was a doctor?!”

“Ship’s doctor, perhaps, judging by the rum on the wind.”

“What kind of bloody doctor can’t tell when a man is dead or not?!”

I shrugged. The same kind of bloody sleuth who can’t tell when a crime’s been committed.

“You didn’t stay. Or make further inquiries.”

I shook my head.

“I floated back from whence I’d come and received a sound thrashing from my mother for playing truant from the funeral. I took my punishment without a whimper, but not without declaring that if I had attended, I would have certainly been able to determine which of the three of them, her, Aunt Violet, or Grand-mama, had been responsible for Uncle Henry’s death. We left for home in the morning, never to return.”

“Holmes!”

I shrugged again. “Well, there it is.”

Silence.

He lit the last of the cigarettes.

“Antinous, eh? I’ve thought of him tonight.”

I pretended not to be flattered by the caress of his eyes.

I held my breath, shook my head at the proffered cigarette, then expelled the question I’d been carrying all afternoon and ever since.

Ever since.

Ever since.

“Why?”

He huffed. “An _affaire de coeur_ , of course. I was a silly romantic ass once upon a time. Still am, by the way.”

“Noted.” How I loved him. “By the way, you made an exquisite corpse.”

He licked his lips. He grinned.

“Go. I’ll see you at noon.”

And as I spilled into the January night, like a Crusaders ship with feverish, holy winds in my sails, I decided that of the two, life was far more adamantine.

**Author's Note:**

> For the curious, [Charades](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13096965/chapters/30222243) is more about Holmes's Uncle Henry. 
> 
> An exquisite corpse poem is a poem by committee, where each participant provides a piece, ignorant of the contributions of the other. The pattern was Adjective Noun Verb Adjective Noun. Four participants (and myself) provided four words and the poem was assembled.


End file.
